The Clockmaker's Last Mechanism

Master Vesna had built four thousand clocks in her lifetime, each one perfect. The last she built in secret, over eleven years, and she never showed it to anyone while she lived.

Her apprentice found it in the locked workshop. A small mahogany case, no face, no hands — only a single keyhole. The note beside it read: 'Wind it if you must. I chose not to.'

She wound it. Two hands emerged from the unmarked face. They spun backwards briefly, then settled — pointing not at numbers but at a window that filled with pale morning light.

She understood: not the day — the quality of the light. She had seen that particular pale grey exactly once before, on the morning her mother died. She set the clock on the mantelpiece and never wound it again.